Overseas Competition: Hit Japanese App Comes to SXSW

March 9, 2012

12:30 pm

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The team at Compath Me will be taking a long flight to SXSW this weekend to show off their app, one of the earlier and hotter location-based discovery apps in Japan.

To wit: Compath Me was incubated through Open Network Lab, funded, and chosen as a LeWeb 2011 finalist, all in the past 11 months. The Tokyo startup also earned a spot as one of Asia’s top 50 apps.

Full of photos and short reviews, Compath Me’s iOS app helps you find venues, restaurants, shops, events, and items. I signed in while in Bangkok and was greeted with a spicy seafood platter and the gold-encrusted Wat Pho Temple.

Like many US apps, Compath Me lets you customize based on your interests, follow trend spotters, and bookmark places. But its target is Asia, specifically Tokyo, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

Compath Me was founded in April 2011 by a team of 2:

Hiromichi Ando, founder and CEO: He is a serial entrepreneur in Japan. He worked at an education startup as director and an epublishing startup as CEO.

Shoko Sakurai, cofounder and CTO: She is a talented engineer who worked at a famous Japanese IT company for 5 years as senior developer.

Through his past experience, Ando learned to avoid angel investors who would conflict with each other, and an engineering-heavy team without the proper design and marketing chops.

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Kira M. Newman is a Tech Cocktail writer interested in the harsh reality of entrepreneurship, work-life balance, and psychology. She is the founder of The Year of Happy and has been traveling around the world interviewing entrepreneurs in Asia, Europe, and North America since 2011. Follow her @kiramnewman or contact [email protected]